All over the world, pain is manifesting itself as light. Cuts and bruises blaze and flash. Arthritic joints glow. Injured troops emit radiant white shards into the desert night. On the news, they're calling it 'The Illumination'.
As this breathtaking phenomenon takes holds, a private journal of love notes passes into the keeping of Carol Ann Page, a lonely hospital patient, and from there through the hands of five other people. Each of them will find their lives changed forever in this masterful novel of human warmth and sheer invention - a story which spans decades and continents, telescopes from the global to the most intimate scale, and shines a spectacular light on the wounds we all bear.
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The most exciting and, in some ways, generous piece of fiction I've read in some time... I relish the way it dazzles and mystifies. I love its generosity of spirit, its whiff of frailty - the way, given Brockmeier's touch with language, he manages to make the whole thing seem steeped in light. Ultimately, I think it gives us one of the most exciting things fiction can offer - a glimpse of a world that is both completely unfamiliar and heart-sinkingly recognisable, whose dark, sweet possibilities seem to exist long after the final pages of the book - Observer
Brockmeier is such a good stylist - Metro
The Illumination is a quietly ambitious work ... Brockmeier clears a space for the exploration of beauties and pains that in a cruder novel might have been sentimental - Times Literary Supplement
Put simply, this novel is absolutely sublime. Indeed, more than once, it moved me to tears. The book is a stunning meditation on pain, mortality and the nature of grief; it is as artfully structured as a Beethoven quartet and every page has a sentence of striking beauty ... one of the most profound and profoundly moving books that it's been my privilege to read - Scotland on Sunday
Gentle notes instil a sense of humour and hope in a world that is full of darkness even when it is bathed in light - The List
His vision is genuinely original...the brilliance of his premise rebounds throughout the novel, catching unexpected angles, radiating metaphor and meaning, and providing us with a new way of thinking about suffering - which must be one of the most important things any novelist can do - Sunday Times
A novel of slight eccentricity and great tenderness - The Times
After a while the book itself seems to glow... The book does something I don't think I've seen any other book do... Brockmeier, by the sheer grace of his writing, forces you to hold... mortality and love... in the forefront of your mind and just let them sink in - Guardian
The Illumination has a fantastically original premise...the writing quality was excellent and I'm sure I'll remember scenes from this book for a long time to come. It is a wonderfully unique novel. Recommended. - Farm Lane Books Blog
It is a delicate and intriguing look at something we ultimately all have in common - Bookgeeks.co.uk
The writing quality was excellent and I'm sure I'll remember scenes from this book for a long time to come. It is a wonderfully unique novel - Farm Lane Books
Gloriously inventive and original, euphorically daring in scope - reminds you that fiction can be energetic and boundary-breaking - New Statesman, Books of the Year
The novel follows a handwritten journal full of love notes from a husband to his wife as it passes through six pairs of hands. Each section is like a self-contained short story; exploring the meaning that each of the recipients takes from this testament of love - Herald
About the Author
Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia; the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. In addition to The New Yorker, he has published in The New York Times, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. He's the 2009 guest editor for the anthology series Best American Fantasy 3 and was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. Brockmeier lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.
